This fall, Yahoo began serious talks to buy photo-sharing site Imgur, a source with first-hand knowledge of those discussions tells us.

Since she joined Yahoo in July 2012, CEO Marissa Mayer has acquired dozens of startups. Most of these acquisitions have been acqui-hires.

The buy that cost Yahoo the most was its $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr. Yahoo bought Tumblr because it has a deeply engaged, youthful audience, that uses the product on mobile. It would buy Imgur for all the same reasons.

Not that Imgur is going to cost that much, even allowing for the standard 50-percent markup on brands ending in R:

Our guess is Yahoo would have to offer something between $100 million and $500 million. But who knows in a world where Snapchat supposedly turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook.

3 comments

Can’t we go back to the days when corporate moguls did stuff like building libraries and universities for the “improvement” of the population, rather than their companies dinking with the product and screwing it up?

I still use Flickr but grudgingly so because it went from being easy and intuitive to sludgy and ugly.

I partially forgive New Flickr; I can once again upload from my work machine, something I was unable to do for a couple years. (I found that out just in time for my home machine to wet the bed and probably need to be replaced)